Will the New Microsoft-Yahoo! Alliance Have Enough Bite to Sink into India’s Online Search Market?
While Google largely dominates the share of searches conducted, ViziSense July’09 data reveals a 38% combined reach of search users for Microsoft-Yahoo!

August 20^th, 2009 (Mumbai, India) - ViziSense (www.vizisense.com), India’s leading online audience measurement and analytics platform, today released its overview on the Indian online search market with insights into share of searches (the total number of searches being conducted by Indian users) and reach of search users (the total number of Indian users conducting searches on a given search engine).

Google has undoubtedly dominated the Indian online search space with over 91% of search market share. The balance 9% of search market share lies with the remaining search players - Yahoo!, Microsoft and some local players like Guruji.com. But interestingly, when it comes to reach of search users, the Microsoft-Yahoo! combine scored a 38% share in India as per ViziSense data for July 2009.

With 38% of Indian users also using Bing or Yahoo! to conduct searches, the primary task for the new Microsoft-Yahoo! alliance remains to increase stickiness and loyalty of these users. “If they succeed in retaining these customers, the Indian online search space can display a very different footprint in the times to come,” observed Amit Bhartiya, Business Head, ViziSense.

Individually, Yahoo! garnered over 27% reach of search users and Bing with 14.81% respectively as compared to Google’s undisputed 93%. Reach of search users would mean the number of Indian users conducting online search using one or more search engines.

With the launch of Bing in June 2009, Microsoft was able to draw an initial lift of an additional 2 million unique users at Google’s expense, while Yahoo! continued to hold its own. Had Microsoft and Yahoo! announced their partnership earlier in June, their combined reach of search users would have been 40%. However, Bing lost some of its early shine with a drop observed in reach of search users in July, while Google regained some of its loyal users. With recent developments of Google announcing its revamped search infrastructure project ‘Caffeine’, things can only get more interesting.

ViziSense (www.vizisense.com) is India's first open online audience measurement service that accurately reports details of site visitor demographics and other audience characteristics. ViziSense is a product from Komli Media. Headquartered in Mumbai, Komli Media is also located in Delhi (India) and New York (US). For more information log on to www.komli.com.